The valley of Chamounix finally became to me the most gloomy and depressing place I was ever in. We made excursions and a few sketches; but I had little sympathy with it, though I tried to do what Ruskin wanted, and to get a faithful study of some characteristic subject in the valley. Every fine day we climbed some secondary peak, five or six thousand feet, and in the evenings we discussed art or played chess, mainly in rehearsing problems, until midnight. Sundays no work was done, but we used to climb some easy hilltop; and there he spent the afternoon in writing a sermon for a girls' school in which he was much interested, but not a hue of drawing would he do. To me, brought up in the severity of Sabbatarianism, the sanctity of the first day of the week had always been a theological fiction, and the result of the contact with the larger world of thinkers and the widening of my range of thought by the study of philosophy had also made me see that the observances of "new moons and fast-days" had nothing to do with true religion, and that the Eden repose of the Creator was too large a matter to be fenced into a day of the week. This slavery to a formality in which Ruskin was held by his terrible conscience provoked me, therefore, to the discussion of the subject. I showed him that there was no authority for the transference of the Christian weekly rest from the seventh to the first day of the week, and we went over the texts together, in which study my Sabbatarian education gave me an advantage in argument; for he had never given the matter a thought. Of course he took refuge in the celebration of the weekly return of the day of Christ's resurrection; but I showed him that the text does not support the claim that Christ rose on the first day of the week, and that the early fathers, who arranged that portion of the ritual, did not understand the tradition of the resurrection. "Three days and three nights," according to the gospel, Christ was to lie in the tomb,--not parts of three times twenty-four hours. But the women went to the tomb "in the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week," and they found that he had already risen and was gone. Now, as by the Jewish ritual the day began at sunset, the first day of the week began with the going down of the sun on Saturday, and, therefore, as Christ had already risen, he must have risen on the seventh day. And the reason of this twilight visit was in the prohibition to touch a dead body on the Sabbath, and the zeal of the disciples sent them to the sepulchre at the earliest possible moment. And I showed him how careless or ignorant of the record the redisposition of the sacred time had been, in the fact of the total disregard of the words of Christ, that he should lie in the earth three days and three nights; for they assumed him to have been crucified on Friday, while he must have lain buried Thursday, Friday,